- the bootloader; I believe this situation is greatly improved since
my
experience

These days, there's one that goes into its own partition/slice:
yaboot.

Yaboot did not work reliably on my machine due to firmware bugs; I
trust
that this situation has improved.

I have had similar problems with with OF bootloaders. However,
according to the people on the debian-ppc list it is possible on just
about any machine.

[...]

- the mouse: it only has one button so you need to emulate the other
two for
X apps that expect three buttons

This is something I had to hand-hack into one of the init scripts at
the
time I disabled Ubuntu's gnome-session startup, installed Windows
Maker,
and set that as the default window manager: There's a utility you
invoke to assign the 2nd and 3rd mouse button functions to F11 and
F12,
respectively.

Nice. I used a kernel argument to to this, but it only worked on ADB
keyboards, not USB.

adding support for single button mice can be done simply by editing
/etc/sysctl.conf : here is an example:

The other thing is that software suspend didn't work, out of the box.
(I haven't fix this, yet.)

Do you mean sleep mode? I never got that to work properly, either.

Sleep mode works on my powerbook G3 (mainstreet), but only seems to
work once per reboot cycle... obviously not ideal. you need pbbuttonsd
for this to work. Again, according to the debian-ppc list it is
possible to get working sleep from newer machines.